Name: Journal of Social History Publisher: Journal of Social History Audience: Academic Format: Magazine/Journal Subject: History; Sociology and social work Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 Journal of Social
History ISSN:0022-4529

Issue:

Date: Spring, 2011 Source Volume: 44 Source Issue: 3

Topic:

NamedWork: When Play Was Play: Why Pick-Up Games Matter (Nonfiction
work)

Persons:

Reviewee: Bishop, Ronald

Accession Number:

254405161

Full Text:

When Play Was Play: Why Pick-up Games Matter. By Ronald Bishop
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. ix plus 203 pp.
$19.95).

One day a half century ago, in an era in which TV sets were fat and
full of tubes, Isabel Alvarez was playing with her sister when they made
a wondrous discovery. "See, those old televisions used to have the
cardboard [backs] with holes in them," Isabel recalled. "So we
took the cardboard off and put our dolls in there and played that it was
the city of Manhattan." (1) This charming story represents what
Ronald Bishop would label "unstructured play," and it well
might have provoked a parental admonishment common when children create
their own amusement: "Don't play with that! That's not a
toy."

When Play Was Play is about restoring unstructured play and
encouraging parents, as the last chapter's title reads, to
"leave those kids alone" so that imagination such as that
exhibited by Isabel Alvarez and her sister can better flourish. The
book's context is a modern take on "what's the matter
with kids today?" Bishop's answer is that they don't know
how to play. He contends that a cultural melange of fear of what lurks
on city streets (real and unjustified), an emphasis (obsession?) with
educational enrichment in and out of school, and two-parent employment
has caused parents to herd their kids into structured activities that
keep them safe and supervised but removed the fun of self-structured
play. More over, what little free time children have for their own play
now is consumed in front of a screen, either a computer or television.

Bishop, an associate professor in the Department of Culture and
Communications at Drexel University, bolsters his analysis with in
stories about how people used to play. He collected 150 of them in a
somewhat unsystematic fashion and supplemented them with a dozen or so
focused interviews. From these, he constructs a "metastory"
about pick-up games and the meanings people attributed to them. Trying
hard not to romanticize his own youth pick-up games (hockey) and those
of others, Bishop contrasts the informal amusements and improvised toys
that most of his story-tellers describe with the ways in which toys and
play activities of today are created and imposed by external sources
rather than from children themselves. He employs frame analysis from
newspaper articles and news broadcasts to illustrate the irony that
though parents and other adults may say that they favor unstructured
play, they really mean unstructured play that is organized by the older
generation.

As antidote, Bishop argues for the restoration of
"jamming," what Eric Eisenberg, another communications
professor, has defined as "personally involving, minimally
disclosive exchanges between individuals." In more ordinary
language, jamming seems to mean simple play in which participants
experience fun rather than some productive function and do so by
engaging with others without doing so at an intense level of personal
involvement. Bishop contrasts this kind of autonomous, unstructured
activity with today's youth sports, which have become so
professionalized, so adult dominated that they remove the opportunity
for kids to develop real passion for what they are doing. Moreover, he
believes, removing the control of games from youngsters does not allow
them to cultivate the toleration and fair play that they are capable of
developing if left alone. These skills are only in part why unstructured
play - pick-up games - matter, just as important, Bishop argues,
following the sensible contention of Brian Sutton-Smith, is the fact
that play makes kids - and adults too - happy. It need not always be,
probably should not be, productive; it should be fun.

Bishop successfully manages to finesse the romanticism of his own
and others' reminiscences, but his analysis does have a few
drawbacks. For example, only briefly does he refer to the negative
qualities of children's unstructured play. Kids, especially when
left alone, can be cruel to each other, even (or especially) in their
games. He notes that "the strong often prevail" (p. 146), but
there is not much mention of exclusion, bullying, or physical injury
that can result from unstructured or unsupervised play. Also, when
discussing games, he invariably uses sports as examples, overlooking the
ways that kids create their own amusements by doing such things as
neglecting rules of a board game and either making up their own rules or
using the pieces (e.g. Monopoly money) for purposes not intended by the
manufacturer. Finally, the focus is on group activity when in fact much
of the most common unstructured play has been and is done alone.
Nevertheless, the book is engaging and thought provoking; it situates
play where it ought to be: in the realm of joy and freedom.